Deal boosts student numbers

The number of Chinese students studying
for a degree at Massey’s Palmerston North campus looks set
to increase by more than 600 percent with a new agreement
between the College of Business and the People’s Republic of
China.

Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Rolf Cremer says the
agreement with NetBig Education Holdings Ltd (Hong Kong)
will bring about 500 Chinese students per year into the
second year of the BBS. The programme will begin in July
this year with a pilot group of 20 to 30 students, expanding
to 150 in February 2002 and 500 in February 2003.

The
programme aims to keep the students together studying in
Palmerston North as much as possible. The Palmerston North
campus and the city itself offer an excellent base for
international students, with a safe, compact environment and
programmes and services already in place, Professor Cremer
says. Having them all at one campus will enable better
targeted provision of support services and group activities,
he says.

He expects resources to expand to cater for the
extra students. “We already have the systems in place, and
this exercise will enable us to efficiently build our
capabilities in the international student arena even
further.”

Professor Cremer says the University’s College
of Business is the leading business school in New Zealand,
and has outstanding expertise and an unrivalled track record
in distance education. It has the capacity to expand its
core programmes into the international, especially the
Greater China and southeast Asian markets.

The
Massey-NetBig initiative is the largest single
revenue-generating project that has ever been agreed and
entered into by the University, Professor Cremer says. The
implications are big, but achievable - administratively (in
terms of appropriate staffing), academically (the need to be
flexible and fast), financially and logistically (the need
to look after those students as a group), he says.

Expanding the College’s service into new markets is the
best way to increase growth, he says. “I fully expect the
initiative will turn out to be the decisive move to increase
funding in the College of Business, and will make a
significant contribution to the University in the
process.”

This week Professor Cremer will host NetBig
representatives at Massey’s Albany, Turitea and Wellington
campuses. During seven working sessions they will discuss
issues about the programme such as admission requirements,
cross-crediting, and the logistics involved in the students’
arrival in New Zealand.

NetBig Education Holdings Ltd is
one of the fastest growing education enterprises in China,
with 250 staff. Its tutoring service subsidiary,
ChinaEdu.com, is the market leader, serving more than
250,000 students. NetBig provides on-line degree programmes
in co-operation with some of China’s top-ranking
universities. One of its strengths is its role as a web-site
host, currently being used by more than 85,000 schools in
China.

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